The desktop beyond F10

[David Nielsen]

2008/11/11 Gian Paolo Mureddu <gmureddu at prodigy.net.mx>

> Rahul Sundaram escribió:
>
>> Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
>>  Or is Fedora enabling RPMFusion by default and
>>
>>> installing these encoders in an "as needed" basis when a user first tries
>>> to sync his/her iPod/Nomad/iriver/Sony/etc DAP?
>>>
>>
>> Fedora cannot do that.
>>
>> Rahul
>>
>
> Excaclty! And that is my whole point! Why lose time discussing this that
> simply cannot be done in Fedora due to the number of legal blackholes it
> would imply. There are a few DAP brands that do allow for free formats to be
> played back on them (iriver, Creative Nomad, Cowon iAuduio, etc), they can
> mostly play .ogg/.flac (beside the array of proprietary formats
> .mp3,.wma,.m4a,.aac, etc), but the main problem with these is the small
> storage capacity compared to the traditional iPod, and while pretty much all
> of these do support video, the video format they mostly support is also
> encumbered (h264 simple profile and MPEG-4 simple profile) I wish Theora
> will mature to the point that it would be a viable alternative for these
> formats and most likely would be picked up by some companies as well (just
> like .ogg Vorbis & FLAC).
>
>
> I, however, wonder what will the status on this be when in 2010 the patents
> on MP3 (dunno which ones) supposedly expire. But that's still a whole 13+
> months away (the whole life-cycle of Fedora 10!).
>
> Speaking about Video, maybe an area (in Multimedia) that would be worth
> investing development and time testing is just video-encoding and editing
> using free formats (theora). Many times in the past I tried to transcode
> some of the videos I own (whether it be DVD or downloaded free-videos) to
> theora. Once I wanted to conduct a quality comparison between theora, MPEG-4
> and h264, but I could never find a good and reliable theora encoder. I do
> believe that ffmpeg (another restricted package) does support transcoding to
> theora, but is there a stand-alone theora encoder?


In terms of video, we could start installing gstreamer-schrodinger by
default (as well as the totem bbc plugin), that is one more format we can
legally ship so we really should, it is also a high quality video codec and
much more likely to do well in your comparison. Does anyone know why we are
not shipping this small package by default to encourage the use of open
formats?

When it comes to encoders for mp3s files we are some what screwed by the
fact that there isn't even a vendor who sells one, Fluendo e.g. only has a
decoder, as you can't get an aac encoder either to the best of my knowledge
there simply is no legal way to use an iPod in countries with software
patents with Fedora (unless you only download legal mp3s but I suspect most
people will want to add their own cds to the collection). The only option
would be using Rockbox and then relying on it's ogg theora support.
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